Finding the Specialty Searches / Google For Dummies

Finding the Specialty Searches

Following its quiet tradition of refusing to promote its fringe features, Google buries its specialty services, perhaps discouraging regular use. You can get to the search engines described in this chapter through the main Google home page, but you have to know where to click and the procedure is tiresome. Your online lifestyle is too busy for excessive mouse clicks. You have virtual places to go and ephemeral people to meet. Chips to devour and soda to drink. This section provides some tips for quickly reaching the government, BSD, Linux, Mac, Microsoft, and university search pages.

Knowing the specialty URLs

First, the URLs of the specialty search pages. The direct Web addresses are so easy to remember (with the exception of the university page) that your preferred method might be to simply type the URL in your browser’s address bar. Here are the addresses, which point self-evidently to their respective search pages:

www.google.com/bsd

www.google.com/linux

www.google.com/unclesam

www.google.com/mac

www.google.com/microsoft

The university page is perplexingly more obscure, but if you have a good memory it doesn’t pose much of a problem:

www.google.com/options/universities.html

Yes, you do need to type the .html at the end. Another option is to leap directly to the search page for a specific university by constructing a URL like this:

www.google.com/univ/princeton

www.google.com/univ/nyu

Notice that some universities are abbreviated, requiring some guesswork on your part. But most names are fairly obvious. Frustratingly, this address

www.google.com/univ

does not deliver the main university search page, though it is the basis of specific university pages.

Specialty searching from the Google Toolbar

An easier way to get to the specialty search pages than typing URLs exists for Google Toolbar users. (See Chapter 9, which asserts that everybody should be a Google Toolbar user. That means you.) You need to put the Combined Search button on the Google Toolbar, if it isn’t there already. That button’s usefulness is described fully in Chapter 9.

For now, our purpose is just to find those specialty search pages. The following steps assume you have the Google Toolbar installed on your browser, but don’t have the Combined Search button.

Click the Google button on the Google Toolbar and choose Toolbar Options from the drop-down menu.

The Google Toolbar Options page appears.
Scroll down and click the experimental features link.

The Google Toolbar Experimental Features page appears.
Under Combined Search button, click the check box.

It’s up to you to decide whether you want to click the second check box, which governs whether the Combined Search button remembers your last search destination. See Chapter 9 for more about this feature.
Click the OK button.

The Combined Search button appears instantly on the Google Toolbar.
Click the small arrow next to the Combined Search button.
On the drop-down menu, click one of the specialty search categories.

You don’t need to enter a keyword into the toolbar’s search box, though of course you may. Clicking the search category without a keyword displays the search page for that category. Using a keyword displays a search results page within that category. The specialty search category for universities does not appear under the Combined Search button.